Puppy aggression - Page 10

Nobody cares about your pedigree , it's breeding dogs who carry a certain trait and Intensifying it fully and then raising and shaping it a certain way but it's 90% genetics .. Not one person here has a dog with any real defense !! Don't talk about it make a video .. Like I've stated before defensive trait has been bred out and replaced with prey drive which is just a big game of thug or chase the ball.

Very few dogs have it and the ones that do are scorned for it or it's a death sentence.

at four months old, do you really know what you have?

No one bats a lid when it is oft mentioned that prey drive can manifest very early in a dog. But if the same is said about defense drive then everyone has a problem with that. However, no one has given a logical explanation why a drive other than prey ( viz: defense ) cannot show up early. I have spoken to trainers coast to coast who says that defense drive can show up as young as 4 months. Howver because of imental immaturity of the dog itself , this drive is wriiten off by a certain community of dog lovers as insecurity. With maturity and confidence based training, these same dogs offer a towering fight with match that defense.

Shawnicus, you're babbling now. I said nothing about 'my' pedigree--I commented on the pedigrees of the dogs in the breeding program of this Romanian kennel you and Mithuna are lauding, and whether you like it or not, the lines are certainly good, but they aren't anything exclusive to that breeder. You don't care about the pedigrees, but then you say that 90% of the traits are genetics...so you actually do care about the pedigrees.

The defense drive hasn't been bred out of the dogs, but a balanced dog doesn't feel the need to trip that trigger for a game of 'bite the sleeve'...it's saved for a legitimate threat, and a dog that's clear in the head can recognize what's real and what isn't, even while still a puppy. Ask KitKat about her Bomber pup's demonstration of this characteristic. It's not a trait that should be spilling out unwarranted, and neutral or friendly strangers don't warrant anything from a civil dog save for dismissal and ignoring.

Mithuna; early onset defensive behavior is fear in the vast majority of pups. Fear can be masked as aggression and look convinceing. Please try to pry yourself away from defending your own dog and learn.

Defense drive towards a non-threat shows fear. A puppy does not genetically know what a "threat" looks like when coming from a person. They do not genetically understand our body language and it is considered a negative when a dog's first reaction to any person is defense since that shows the dog is confused and thinks that everything in life is a threat. Contrary to what most people believe, this was never meant to be a genetic trait of a German Shepherd Dog. It is EXTREMELY easy to teach/show a dog what a threat looks like, or what we want a threat to look like, but it is definitely not something that is genetically ingrained in them. Human body language is taught to dogs, they're not born with an understanding of it. It is proven by training which can show a dog a frontal position, but still make it a non threat. If the helper never presents a threat in a frontal position, the dog never learns that the frontal position is a threat. A lot of protection foundaiton work is showing a dog what different body positions mean and what kind of response they should give depending on the helpers (or threat's) body position. These positions mimick real life situations in which a dog might have to protect...frontal means the threat is coming at you, high chance of attack. Side ways or backwards means the threat is running away and isn't as high of a threat level as a forward moving frontal position, therefore the same level of defense isn't necessary and the dog is allowed to chase the threat in prey.

Prey drive SHOULD manifest early in a predator. They need to hunt from an early age in order to survive and learn the skills they will need to get food when older. Defense shouldn't be present in puppies because their ONLY chance in the wild if facing a threat is to run or hide. Fighting will likely lead to death in most situations if speaking about 4 month old predators in the wild.

Of course through selective breeding and environmental change we have been able to adjust the time table of wild canines, but the theory of drives still remains. When you see enough dogs, work enough dogs, you see a pattern of how a defensive/scared puppy turns out when it gets older.

BW; !!!!!!!!!!!! good post. Never send a boy to do a man's job.

BW

quite a few folks ( LE and breeders ) as well as owners on other forums have said exacty the opposite of what you said. defense can manifest early in a dog but being immature it looks like fear. Later on and with proper training protocols these dogs carry a huge fight to match the aggression.
 

Of course defense CAN manifest early. But it's not reliable and not something you want to see. More often than not, a puppy showing defense will turn into a nerve bag and not be a confident dog during protection training.

Quite a few folks? Get off the internet and talk to people with real experience. At the moment I know you've never left your little island for training so I know that you haven't actually spoken with many people in real life about dog and protection training. Get out there in the real world and speak to high level trainers, work under them, and see what it is they value in a dog. Start thinking logically and critically rather than just accepting what sounds best to you because it matches what you see in your dog and what you want to develop in your dog. Maybe when you finally start to figure out what people say and what it really means when you see it, you’ll understand more about dog training and drives.

Can a dog that shows defense this early on be worked in protection? Sure. Can it eventually bring fight? Sure. But the funny thing is, "with proper training protocols" means that the fight has to be taught. The dog has to be taught to work through the insecurity and that the way it gets over the fear of the man is through fighting and winning. It’s a process, it’s not natural, it’s taught by the helper. You fight me, you win, you bark at me, I turn around/cower, you win. It’s the most archaic of training methods out there. It’s CONFIDENCE BUILDING. Why do you need to build it? Because the dogs lack confidence naturally. I’m glad that I don’t have to do any of that in my dogs.

FYI Mithuna…nothing you can say to me will surprise me. I know all the methods you speak of, I know all the things others have probably said to you and can work a dog in defense as well as the next guy. I know how to build confidence in a dog, I know how to push a dog to it’s limit and then back off teaching it that it can get past that fear and win. It’s not rocket science, it’s not a new concept, it’s basic helper work. The online heroes you worship just make it sound more difficult than it actually is because they want you to think they’re something special and that only a select few of them can do what they do. Most helpers can do what they do…many of them just don’t care to work dogs like that since it’s just extra work to get to the same place you can get with a more prey driven dog in half the time with half the effort.

I would love to see the people that have said EXACTLY the opposite of my last statement. I've never heard anything close to the opposite of that. Yes, there are dogs that only have defense at a young age (most show lines for instance) but there is no argument over my analysis of a wild predator/canine and how their drives develop. I've yet to meet a truly high level/successful helper or dog trainer that believes a dog that is going off on everything that walks by at 4 months of age is going to make a good protection dog.

Running away is defense.